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For the excellent Legal Tech class I’m taking at Stanford Law School on the future of legal technology, I am proposing to build a WebMD for law. My central question is ‘how might we build tech that could help a lay person diagnose their own legal problems’? I am asking it because most legal technology…

A blog post by solo practitioner Carolyn Elefant detailed her issues with the current legal start ups that supposedly increase ‘access to justice’, but in her estimation are just providing more cut-rate, less-than legal services which don’t really serve the under-served. Instead, she encourages start ups and Silicon Valley investors to refocus on providing legal…

Sri Lankan tech researcher & TED fellow Sanjana Hattotuwa has laid out some of the basic capabilities that mobile phones in the field can be used in dispute resolution and rule of law. Data gathering Plotting the GIS coordinates of the disputed territory, including details of the location, resources and details of adjacent territory Details…

A paper on “An Asian Perspective on Online Mediation” puts forward an agenda for making all the advances made in Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) transition to mobile devices. ODR had been desktop-based, but this isn’t relevant for the majority of the world, who do not have reliable access to dekstops, but who are regular users…

A major problem in governance is the spread of misinformation and rumors. Sometimes these result from concerted campaigns by political actors, to manipulate politicians with rumors meant to make them suspicious or fearful about something. Other times rumors are not driven by anyone, but snowball on their own. Either way, flare-ups of rumors can wreak…

The Internet Bar Organization has fielded a proposed design, the Internet Silk Road Initiative, that would use online and mobile tech to provide access to justice & dispute resolution capabilities to Afghanistan. The project’s website is down now, indicating that perhaps the proposal has been shelved right now. But its ambit is of interest: “The…

http://popplet.com/app/#/535625 This is my law/design class’ brainstorm on problems refugees & the UNHCR face in communication. There are many challenges, especially in opening more reliable, trustworthy, & resonant channels between the UN bureaucracy and the refugees in an unsettled & knowledge-deprived space.

Dispute resolution mechanisms inside refugee communities can be a model for other resolution systems in non-refugee contexts. For example, consider the ideas identified in this write-up of design interventions in a Serbian camp in the 1990s, by Divna Persic-Todorovic. In particular, consider in-person and game-based trainings in dispute resolution. “This article is about the work on…

An article from Ben Paynter at Good Magazine about Gary Well’s work in the Austin Police Department to use a computer program to improve crime witnesses’ identification of suspects. an excerpt “It’s an experimental protocol designed by Gary Wells, the guru of eyewitness reliability—or rather, unreliability. The director of social sciences at the American Judicature Society’s Center for…